I guess the NY Times is just discovering that Halloween is the perfect time for women to let out their inner tramp.

Men knew this. Hell, we invented Halloween many years ago for no other reason than to get Celtic women out of those ill-fitting robes and into some cool outfits.

Even seeing that picture makes me feel all piratey. If she were here I’d totally make her surrender her booty.

“It’s a night when even a nice girl can dress like a dominatrix and still hold her head up the next morning,” said Linda M. Scott, the author of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism and a professor of marketing at the University of Oxford in England.

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Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with ‘paragenitals’ on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It’s Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it’s still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs. Yes, male bat bugs use blood insemination and then the sperm have to swim to the ovaries.

It’s gruesome and bizarre and therefore completely worthy of a science article that transcends zoology and gets right to the sexual politics.

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“It’s hard finding the perfect woman,” my friend Jack said to me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you want to borrow my copy of Poison Ivy: The New Seduction?”

“No, no, we all know why you never answer the phone when My Name Is Earl is on TV. You went three hours early to get tickets for DOA the day it opened and ended up being the only person in the whole theater. I mean finding the perfect woman for me is difficult. I am always excited when things get going but then I find some annoying flaw.”

“I understand completely,” I said, though in truth I did not. It’s well known that the line of perfect women waiting to date scientists is so long it can be seen from space. “Have you ever written down the qualities you want, or are you more the type who likes a lot of qualities and will enjoy any girl who is exceptional in one of them?”

“I think I am that second one,” he said. “I don’t want to be elitist.”

“No, setting your standard high and settling for less only by necessity would be too easy, I agree,” I said. “Let’s take the scientific approach. I have all of the women I can think of in the handy Cashitude 8500 laptop. We can create a regression algorithm that will help you converge on the perfect one.”

Off to the lab we went.

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I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Numbers are significant because on a personal and a collective conscious level numbers help us understand the world in a way that letters cannot. I can go anywhere in the world and hold up two fingers and the most illiterate peasant in China knows that means I am with two supermodels. Can I speak Chinese? Well, yeah, Mandarin actually, but you can’t.

Plus, there are 400 dialects in China so I certainly can’t express how many supermodels I am with in any other way and have it be so clear. Numbers are the magical language. I can do music with numbers ( the circle of fifths ), language, art and science. Even when I do TKD I am using a sine wave.

Numbers work for everyone. Numbers have order and meaning. To pseudo-scientists they even have esoteric definitions. Numerologists, for example, claim that 1 is the Yang and 2 is the Yin, staying in our Chinese theme. More on that later.

My favorite? Six.

Six is important. Six is famous. Six was the magical number of ancient Avalon. Christian authorities labeled six “the number of sin” and 666 is certainly a bad thing. One of its Egyptian forms is seshemu (”sexual intercourse” ) ­ shown in hieroglyphics by male and female genitals doing … you know, what I do a lot more of than you … and we still know of it today in the Sufi love-charm designed to open the “cave” of the Goddess: “Open, Sesame.”

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There’s a war that’s brewing and you may not be aware of it. It’s right under our noses but it has been kept out of the mainstream media due to a growing web of deniers and obfuscaters who regard misinformation and doubt as allies. Like many insurrections it has been funded quietly but it’s effects can be devastating to people in the war zones, like the line that stretches out the door at Tully’s.

That war, my friends, is the War On Coffee.

Coffee is good. Coffee is good for you. Science has proved this on numerous occasions yet time and again I see sources in the mainstream media trying to establish doubt about the total awesomeness of coffee.

I saw yet another hit piece on coffee today, this one titled Researchers Discover How Coffee Raises Cholesterol. Where did they get that idea?

But I am a fair person, I want to know if my health is at risk, so I took a random sample of 928 articles on coffee, none of which were found to express doubt in its total awesomeness. That is a consensus, people.

Yet the deniers will not accept it. The issue, they say now, is Cafestol, a diterpene molecule found in coffee. Well, diterpene molecules are our friends, since that’s how we get Retinol, the animal form of vitamin A and an important antioxidant. Unless you like having lousy vision and brittle bones. Why are they blaming Cafestol? Who is behind this? The only answers I found came from one source, not surprisingly the exact same source behind the recent study saying coffee is bad: Baylor University. The folks at Baylor wrote a similar hit piece in 2005.

So off to Baylor I went, to the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology. But they were on to me. When I arrived, the place was cleared out. Mostly. I did find this.

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